Gesucht: 6 Millionen Barrel Erdöl. Täglich.

It was far from clear where the world was going to find another two million barrels a day of new supply to meet another year of demand growth. That would be in addition to the nearly four million barrels a day of new production that must be brought on simply to replace what is lost every year in depletion.

Peak Everything

Peak water…peak oil…peak food…peak this, peak that. After so many alarms with so few fires, many people think they can put away the fire extinguishers. Higher prices draw forth more supply…and substitutes. The limits seem to recede forever.

But the threat of disaster hasn’t disappeared; it is just retreating in good order like the Tsar’s troops…waiting for the worst possible moment to strike. There is only so much arable land. There is only so much water. There is only so much energy to move food and water.

Die BP-Hypokrisie

In a fight between a group of zombies and a real producer, their sympathies should be with the oil man. After all, when they drive into the filling station, it’s not the Congressional Record that they pump into their fuel tanks. And when they heat their homes, it’s not tort lawyers whom they look to for fuel. Gasoline is valuable. They know it. And they know that someone has to get it. In fact, so keen is their demand for octane, and so high is the price, that the producers are lured farther and farther away from dry land. No one would drill a mile below the water for oil unless a lot of people wanted it badly. Sooner or later, one of the rigs was bound to spring a big leak.

Der grösste Erdölkonsument der Welt

Mr. Obama is not only America’s president. He also presides over the biggest single user of oil in the world – the US military. The pentagon uses twice as much oil as the entire nation of Ireland. It sends soldiers in oil-burning airplanes to places of no apparent importance where they drive around in oil-burning machines for no apparent reason.

Wann dreht jemand „2015“?

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact. […]

„By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,“ says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

Die Energie-zu-Kapital-Alchemie stottert

Theoretically, oil production could continue to rise if there were enough investment. For example, one could theoretically ramp up oil sands production, plus oil shale production, and maybe even add some coal to liquid production. But to do something of this sort would require a huge amount of additional capital, and this in turn would require even more debt. Dennis Meadows of „Limits to Growth“ fame has said the limiting variable in our current predicament is capital. It looks to me as if we are at this point running up against this limit, certainly from the point of borrowing for capital. Real capital, created by net energy, has likely been declining for years.